


we're still sleeping like we're lovers

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Anal Fingering, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Light Dom/sub, Pre-Series, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-15 21:16:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9257684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Snapshots from James and Miranda's life on New Providence.





	1. two hands longing for each other's warmth

**Author's Note:**

> Fic and chapter titles from 'Still' by Daughter, which I discovered through an excellent and heartbreaking James/Thomas/Miranda fanvid, [still with hearts beating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMt8zSZjLrU).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fill of [this kink meme prompt](https://blacksails-kink.dreamwidth.org/2583.html?thread=24343#cmt24343):
> 
> "I would love something involving James nuzzling his face into Miranda's breasts and sucking on her nipples, seeking comfort, like maybe soon after becoming Flint and seeking out the softness of her flesh to ground him and bring him back.
> 
> (NO infantalism if for some reason you take nipple-sucking and breasts as comfort to mean that. I don't see any realation to it but someone might so I thought I'd say that is most assuredly not what I am after)
> 
> Can be standalone, part of foreplay, foreplay and during sex, or lazily in the afterglow, up to you"

“James,” she says, and everything in him lists like a ship in a storm. She touches his hair, his face. “James, I’m glad to see you back.”

It is an odd sensation, hearing his own name. Like those moments when you think you see a stranger wave to you, and you feel confused and awkward until you realise that the stranger meant the gesture for someone else, someone standing behind you. He hears his own name from Miranda’s mouth, and he thinks: _Me? Are you talking to me?_ He is at a loss, yet there is nobody else to answer her apart from him. Her face is like a moonbeam reflected in water, radiance that has dimmed and fractured.

“Were you injured?” she asks. He begins to shake his head, but then nods.

“It is nothing,” he says roughly, at the alarm on her face. He is surprised he still has a voice. “Shallow wounds. They’ve all been seen to by the ship’s doctor.”

She moves to take off his shirt, and he does not stop her. She disturbs the bandaging without meaning to. He shuts his eyes, and feels the phantom slice of blade through flesh. Tastes someone else’s blood in his mouth, gunmetal and brine. Hears the sound of gurgling, someone choking on their own death. Sees red, red, red.

He opens his eyes. There is only Miranda’s long brown hair, and her anxious eyes meeting his. The house smells clean, not saltwater and sweat but citrus and something more decliate, the scent of flowers he cannot name. The light in here does not shift continuously. The walls are stone and grey. 

“Miranda,” he says. “Please.” He does not know what he is asking for, only that he wishes he did not feel like a foreigner in his own body.

“Perhaps you ought to have a rest while I make some food,” she says. She takes a step back from him, but he grasps her hand.

She hesitates, but then she leads him to the bedroom. She sheds her dress while he watches like a shadow in the doorway. She sits down on the bed, back against the pillows. “Come here, James,” she says. “Come here.” Like rain in spring calls forth green shoots, her voice draws him out of the dark. He climbs onto the bed and straddles her legs and she hugs her to him. His nose bumps against her shoulder. He turns towards her neck and inhales; she even smells like the rain, like freshly turned soil. He can feel the softness of her breasts against his chest.

They stay like this for a long moment, and then he presses his lips to her neck, and down to the hard point of her collarbone, then a little along to the place between her collarbones. His lips traverse further down the slope of her breast, each press of lips now acccompanied by a light suck of skin. She strokes his hair while he flicks his tongue over her nipple.

He thinks about the way the tide embraces the shore and then falls away from it again. He thinks about the white foam at the tide’s edge like lace at the hem of a dress. 

Miranda’s nipple hardens against his tongue. He kisses it over and over and sucks it between his teeth, and she cries out, her hand a gentle pressure on the back of his head. His mind begins to empty, echoing with the seashell sound of ocean.

He rubs his cheek against the swell of her breast, looking up at her. “You’ll be all right,” she murmurs. “My dear, you’ll be all right.” Her eyes are damp. Neither of them will ever be all right, but he does not point this out.

He cups her other breast in his hand, squeezing it, then again, harder, feeling as though he holds her beating heart. A memory snags on the brambles in the harsh terrain of his mind: that time Thomas laid one hand on Miranda’s chest and one hand on his, in an attempt to compare the two heartbeats and describe how they differed.

He smiles despite himself, remembering, before the usual anguish that follows such happy memories crushes him. He closes his eyes against its onslaught and tries to focus again on the warmth of Miranda’s skin, on the sweet scent of it. He maps the smooth curve of her breast with his lips and tongue, and then he laps at her nipple and latches onto it, sucking endlessly. Her breath begins to sound uneven, her chest heaving under his mouth; he keeps sucking until he knows it must be sore by now, but she never asks him to stop.

He can feel her hips grinding minutely upwards. He is not hard, but he brings a hand to her wetness and drags his fingers through it, circling his thumb against the place that brings her the most pleasure. “Yes, oh God, yes,” she whispers, cradling his head, gripping his hair, encouraging him to keep sucking her nipple. The rhythm of his own motions helps him. He thinks only of the tide and the shore once more.

Her moans become broken and he feels the wet clench of her around his fingers. He nuzzles the valley between her breasts, licking the sweat that beads on the skin there. She sighs and kisses his forehead, combs through his hair that she must have made a mess of.

She looks into his eyes. “James,” she says, and it finally sounds like his own name.


	2. two hands digging in each other's wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fill of [this kink meme prompt](https://blacksails-kink.dreamwidth.org/2583.html?thread=23831#cmt23831): "There's a prompt up above with Silver being spanked. I really need one with Flint being the bottom and having his ass smacked and liking it. That's it, that's the prompt. Extra bonus points if Miranda is the one doing the spanking."

Some days when James is in the house, he cannot seem to bear to be in the same room as her, but he cannot bear to be away either. On those days she gives him as much distance as she can. Today she spends the day tending to the garden and then reading by the hearth, until it grows too dark and her eyes tire. When she retreats into their bedroom, she catches him standing in front of the portrait, nursing a bottle of rum and grimly hanging onto a corner of the frame, glaring at the couple in the painting. _Mr and Mrs Thomas Hamilton_ , it is written at the bottom. Two people who no longer exist.

She lays a hand on his shoulder, and he turns his head abruptly, apparently too lost in his own thoughts to have even heard her enter the room. His green eyes are sharp as the jagged glass of a smashed rum bottle.

“Miranda, I should have…” He closes his eyes, then opens them again. “I should have rescued him, or died trying.”

She shakes her head. James is always returning to this subject, like a dog that won’t stop gnawing at his favourite bone. “Thomas made me promise that I would take care of you,” she says, as she has said before. “That I would keep you safe.”

“Keep me safe,” James repeats. His bites his lip, tilts his head. “What would he think if he saw me now? Would he not think it would have been better that I died rather than become… _this_?”

“James!” she rebukes. “You know he would not think that, that he would prefer to see you alive above all. He would have pardoned every single one of the pirates, James, men he did not know as anything other than the crimes they had committed. You think he would not have forgiven you? He _loved_ you.”

James takes a swig of the rum, glancing down at the man in the portait. It is not a particularly good likeness. Miranda wonders if one day she’ll forget what Thomas actually looked like, if when she thinks of Thomas, she will think of this portrait instead of her husband as he really was.

“I don’t know what the _fuck_ he would think of me now, because he’s _dead_ , and it’s—” James’ voice breaks on the word. “It’s my fault.”

The worst part of it is, sometimes, there’s a voice in Miranda’s head that blames James for it too. She tried to warn him and he would not listen, and now her husband is dead, and she has to live as if she were already a ghost, sequestered and powerless.

But tonight she will not heed that voice; or at the very least, she will transform it into something else. She sits down on the edge of the bed. “James,” she says. She takes a deep breath. “If you insist that it is your fault, then you must let me treat you as you think you deserve.” She pats her lap, and James’ eyes widen as comprehension sets in.

They had done this before, once, in London. Miranda had spanked him in front of Thomas, and ordered him to keep eye contact with Thomas the whole time. Then, it had been playful punishment when she had become fed up with hearing him say that he did not deserve Thomas, and he had whined at every smack, gasping Thomas’ name as he rubbed himself against her leg desperately, and obediently never looking away from Thomas’ eyes no matter how much he blushed with embarrassment.

So she knows it is something he likes.

James stands there now in front of her. He must be reliving the same memory; sadness is still playing across his features, but a tinge of redness blossoms there too. His hand, the one not gripping the neck of the bottle, twitches nervously, and he meets her eyes.

He sets down the bottle heavily on the table and paces over to her: only four steps, but each step is slow and measured like the ticking of a clock’s second hand. He pauses when he is right before her, and she says, “Pull down your trousers and lie face down across my lap.”

A wince contorts his face momentarily. He is Captain Flint now, so used to giving orders rather than taking them. Well, in her bedroom he is still James. “I know you can’t be the good boy you once were, James, but you can do this much for me, can’t you?” She raises her eyebrows at him and purses her lips, haughty as can be.

He does as she says, then, unbuttoning his trousers and shoving them down his hips. His shirt is long, falling halfway down his thighs. When he settles into position over her lap, the first thing she does is ruck up his shirt to expose his arse. She lays a gentle palm on one of his cheeks, just feeling the firm flesh. Her wedding ring glints up at her.

No need to take it off, since it is her right hand she’ll use to hit him. But her gaze lingers on it all the same, the ring on her hand, her hand on James’ arse.

“You’re right, James,” she says, smoothing her palm over the curve of his arse. “You are worse than all the other pirates. You are more bloodthirsty and savage than any of them. You deserve no forgiveness, no mercy.”

She lands the first smack then. A light one. She hears the intake of his breath, but nothing more. She draws her right hand back again, and brings it down more forcefully this time. His flesh wobbles under her hand.

“You are completely irredeemable.” She hits him again, and he groans. “You are beyond hope.” She delivers another slap, and he bucks. “Nobody could ever love you now.”

She swings her hand down hard. “ _Fuck_!” he swears. Her palm is starting to smart.

“Nobody could ever look at you now and see anything but a monster, could they, James?” She squeezes his arse; it is red as an apple, and freckled just the same. Then she hits him again, and again. He gasps each time, and she feels his length hardening against her thigh. 

“All of this is your fault,” she hisses, smacking his arse with every drop of strength she has. “All of it. You are to blame for everything that we’re suffering right now.” His flesh radiates heat under her hand. His hands are clenched fists, grasping the bedsheet tightly.

“Oh _God_ , Miranda,” he moans when her hand falls upon his arse again, this time flat in the middle, across both cheeks at once. “Jesus Christ.” He grinds against her, dragging his cock along the top of her thighs.

“Look at you,” she says and punctuates it with the beautifully crisp sound of another slap in the same place, right in the middle. “You awful, _awful_ man. Look at you enjoying what I’m doing to you. You’re utterly depraved, aren’t you?”

His voice is ragged; he is almost sobbing. “Yes, oh God, yes, Miranda, I should be—ashamed.” He turns his head and meets her eyes. He is not, in this moment, ashamed. She feeds him two of her fingers, slipping them into his mouth. He sucks them eagerly, wetting them thoroughly with his tongue, all the while looking at her with those green eyes. He is as innocent as he ever was.

“Nobody would ever touch you like this now, would they?” She runs a hand all the way down the length of his back and takes her fingers out of his mouth. “You don’t deserve to be touched like this, ever again.” She trails those fingers over his entrance, teasing it.

“I don’t deserve it,” he echoes, his head still twisted back to look at her. “Please, Miranda, Christ, _please_ let me have it.” 

She presses one finger inside, gazing down at his reddened arse. He whimpers, his hips writhing. She slides another finger in and he cries out; she sees him shudder all along his shoulders. She fucks him with those two fingers, her other hand digging nails into his red, red flesh.

“Oh fuck, Miranda, thank you, oh God, thank you, please don’t stop,” he babbles incessantly as she continues to finger him, thrusting her fingers as deep inside him as she can and curling them, working them in and out of him in a frenzied rhythm. She drags her nails deliberately down over the sensitive skin of his arse, and then she spanks him again, with all her might, and he _shouts_ , arching his back as he comes, dampening the dress that still covers her thighs.

He pants for a minute afterwards, burying his face in the sheets while she caresses his bottom soothingly. When he lifts his head again, his eyes are still shining and the sheets are wet with his tears.

“You know I did not mean a word of it,” she says, feeling the tears drying uncomfortably on her own face. “I love you.”

“I know,” he says, voice hoarse. “Thank you. It… It helped.”

She smiles; it feels difficult and unfamiliar on her lips now. “Good,” she says, ruffling his hair. “That is all I wanted.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are really appreciated! <3 And if you wanna talk about James/Miranda feels, I'm always up for that – come find me [on tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com)!


End file.
